The Red Door Read online

  One thing I do regret when I was teaching and writing was that I didn’t revise things as much as I would have liked to have done. I don’t just mean revision; I also mean having the courage to wait, maybe for a year or two, rather than doing it very quickly.

  Crichton Smith admired the restraint of writers who focused resolutely on quality rather than quantity, people such as the world-class Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean (brother of Oban High School’s rector, Iain’s friend John Maclean, famous himself in Highland literary circles for producing a Gaelic translation of Homer’s Odyssey).

  The balance between compulsive, honest, lyrical spontaneity and injudicious haste is a precarious one, sometimes realised in Iain’s writing as an agreeable, smooth, uninhibited and wholly natural fluidity, but other times realised as a rashness suggestive of fingers flurrying across the typewriter at almost quicker-than-thought speed. Nonetheless it is the sign of an agile creative mind, muscular, efficient, and concentrated, that such spontaneous literary writings can stand up to scrutiny.

  Iain’s mother, a returning presence in his work, exerted a great influence on his mind. Writing about her towards the end of his own life, Iain Crichton Smith described the ‘intense pity’ he felt for her. Her life had been a difficult one, not least of all because, widowed at a young age, she was left to bring up three sons in economically challenged circumstances (often swallowing her ‘stubborn pride’ to borrow money ‘from villagers whom essentially she was not in tune with.’) She was very protective of Iain when he was young and he made a number of sacrifices to look after her as she grew older: ‘There came a time when she would not leave the house, was indeed frightened to do so. Murdo therefore remained in the house as well: thus he had very little opportunity to enjoy himself in any way.’

  Iain’s mother passed away in 1969 and this had a profound effect on the writer who, four years prior to her death, had said:

  I myself am fascinated with old people on the verge of leaving life. It links with my obsession with death, which really is the extreme situation. How you face it is the test of all you are. Lawrence said every writer has to conquer death in some way before he can write or live.

  After his mother’s death, however, it seemed that death might conquer him . . .

  His mother had died. He went to the hospital and saw her dead face which seemed to have become stern and Roman. He felt as if ice surrounded him and he was trembling all the time. He felt as if he was in outer space. It was actually the first dead person he had seen. At this point and for a long time his whole personality disintegrated. He would not go to school. He felt as if death had destroyed his writing.

  Feeling isolated, guilty, pained, Iain’s torment was no doubt exacerbated by overwork. He sought solace and diversion by visiting writer friends such as Norman MacCaig in Edinburgh and George Mackay Brown in Orkney. It is clear that his mother’s death was a devastation from which the writer took some time to recover.

  Iain’s recuperation, largely instigated by one woman, was actually the start of a period of personal and creative rejuvenation. He had begun to meet with Donalda a year or so before his mother’s death. Eleven years younger than him, Donalda had at one time been a pupil of his at Oban High School. Now working as a nurse, she had been considering a switch to primary teaching and had sought Iain’s help in securing her Higher English.

  His relationship with Donalda developed, heralding a new period of happiness in Iain’s life:

  Donalda and Murdo used to go for dinner every Saturday night to a different hotel in Argyll. Sometimes in the autumn they used to pick brambles. Murdo gradually recovered from the death of his mother, for which he had suffered guilt and genuine grief.

  In Donalda’s company, Iain began to think of Argyll as ‘the loveliest area he had ever been in’. He describes waiting for Donalda to visit his flat with a joyfully simple and affecting beauty:

  In his flat in Combie St, he would listen for Donalda’s footsteps on the stone stairs. In her yellow dress she was like an actual physical ray of sunshine entering his house.

  Indeed, Iain fully recognised how important Donalda was to his well-being, how centrally important she had become to his happiness.

  Having long understood that meeting Donalda was ‘a turning point’ in his life, he married her in July 1977, a month after he had retired from teaching. (Crichton Smith had actually tried to leave teaching on two previous occasions, ‘but had lost his nerve’). Donalda and the two boys, Peter and Alasdair, moved in to the flat. Iain settled in to a routine of writing in the morning, preparing the boys’ lunches, then writing again in the afternoon, still driven, as he had always been, by a very Leòdhasach Protestant work ethic.

  Crichton Smith’s marriage precipitated a new joy in his work – an energetic delight at the spontaneous beauties of nature, for example, although his writings have always had an undercurrent of darkness, sometimes nudging at the reader’s mind and sometimes quite overwhelming it. One of his best novels, In the Middle of the Wood, charts the breakdown of a married writer whose paranoia necessitates a spell in a psychiatric hospital. If the novel’s tone seems disturbingly autobiographical, there is a good reason for that, as Edwin Morgan has pointed out:

  Smith has said that the whole story is true, and if this is so, it is a most remarkable example of how an artist will use the material of his life, no matter how terrible it may be, and perhaps achieve the double function of exorcising some of his demons and presenting his readers with a highly dramatic story.

  Thankfully, Iain recovered from the breakdown and went on to write some of his greatest work.

  By the time of his death in 1998, Iain Crichton Smith had become one of Scotland’s best-known and best-loved writers. His rich ouevre won him a great many accolades and honorary degrees. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.

  There is no doubt, therefore, that Iain is a major Scottish writer. But it is at this pertinent juncture that I wish to raise –and subsequently attempt to demolish – another popular misconception: that Iain Crichton Smith was a great poet who ‘also wrote prose’. Undeniably, close scrutiny reveals a degree of inconsistency in his stories (just as in his poetry), but I wish to argue that Iain was, on balance, a much better short story writer than he is usually given credit for. Indeed, some of his stories are so tightly charged with evocative imagery and intensely appropriate wording that they constitute prose-poems.

  Sorley Maclean’s comments are representative of a general attitude that has arisen among some critics with regard to Crichton Smith’s writings:

  In spite of at least one most moving novel, Consider the Lilies, several generally fine volumes of short stories like Trial without Error [sic], many brilliant plays both in English and in Gaelic and much reviewing and lecturing, Iain Crichton Smith is primarily a poet even if he spends more time at the other literary work than at poetry.

  Crichton Smith confessed in an interview for Books in Scotland that he did not think of himself as a novelist, saying: ‘I am not a novelist, but I like challenges in that form.’ He also said, revealing just how important the short story form was to him, ‘What I really see myself as is more a short story writer and a poet.’

  In ‘The Necessity of Accident’, an excellent, insightful essay appraising Crichton Smith’s English-language fiction, Cairns Craig writes:

  [It is]tempting to look upon Crichton Smith’s prose writing as the workshop of his poetic imagination – an outlet for a creativity which cannot cease from generating words rather than the mode in which his imagination truly seeks its expression – the hobby of an obsessive wordsmith rather than his vocation . . . But to treat the prose fiction as subsidiary – either to earlier models of Scottish fiction or to Crichton Smith’s own poetic creations – is to miss the intensity of his commitment to the medium and the significance of his achievement in it.

  Indeed, we do a great disservice to Iain Crichton Smith’s memory by misunderstanding, or downplaying, the role of short stories in his contribution
to literature.

  Survival without Error and other stories (1970) was not Iain’s first short story collection to be published, but it was his first English-language short story collection. He had won himself considerable recognition in the field of Gaelic literature since the publication of Bùrn is Aran (‘Water and Bread’, 1960), a book that, in its first edition at least, contained both short stories and poems (an indication, perhaps, of the paucity of Gaelic publishing opportunities). He had also published the story collection An Dubh is an Gorm (‘The Black and the Blue’, 1963), two English-language novels (Consider the Lilies, 1968, and the underrated The Last Summer, 1969), plus a number of poetry collections.

  Iain wrote far more material in English than he did in Gaelic, but his Gaelic short stories were – and are – held in high esteem and, in contrast with critical responses to his English-language work, his Gaelic prose is generally viewed among Gaelic speakers at least as favourably as his Gaelic poetry.

  Survival without Error contains fourteen stories, many of them set in Scotland, and many of them concerned with the ways in which diverse people manage to find their way through life’s day-to-day impositions and demands, individuals consciously trying to cause but the minimum of fuss and controversy while negotiating the varying weathers of desire and injustice. In negotiating life this way, the individual often compromises him- or herself to the extent that they are personally diminished, sometimes almost drained of authenticity and true identity. Survival without Error is partly an examination of bourgeois values and mores – surviving ‘without error’ seems to be an impossibility – but this fine collection feeds off fighting tensions that are often characteristically and tantalisingly ambiguous.

  The Black and the Red (1973) is a more diverse short story collection than its predecessor, with stories taking place in, for example, hotels, universities, and World War II trenches. Certain themes do emerge, however, especially alienation and separation. Characters, as is often the case in Iain’s stories, tend to be somewhat physically passive, though very active mentally. They seem to be observers, not always fully engaged with their surroundings – attempting to understand, rather than change, the world.

  It is a wonderful collection, and contains some of Crichton Smith’s classic short stories, such as ‘The Dying’, ‘The Telegram’, and the title story. The twenty-one stories focus primarily, though not exclusively, on themes of identity, exile, and human interaction. The narratives are mediated through a voice that is sometimes realistic and sometimes surreal, but always recognisably Crichton Smith’s.

  It is a pleasure to make available again the stories from Iain’s subsequent collection, The Village (1976). The Village partially shares its title with The Village and other poems, one of his finest poetry collections, though it seems, unfairly, to have had little of the latter’s recognition.

  The Village comprises a series of interlinked tales set in a single Scottish – and, it must be admitted, darkly Lewis-like – community. That the village changes size and appearance from time to time in no way detracts from the collection. The stories here are concerned with many aspects of insular Scottish life: the personal tensions simmering beneath a social veneer, the claustrophobia, the routine, the gossip, the emptiness, the conformity, the paranoia, and the paralysis.

  The Village is a marvellous achievement, breathing slow-measured life into a community that is, behind the images of stasis and decay, alive with tensions, inner voices, and stark truths. The stories have a great deal about individual and community-wide identity within the Highlands, often creating drama out of the smallest occurrence. ‘The Red Door’ is a fine example of the way in which Crichton Smith can make a story of human insight and development out of an apparent triviality, in this case a mysteriously painted door. Murdo awakens one day to find that his door is no longer green but has been ‘painted very lovingly’ red. It is now the only red door in the village. This simple act changes Murdo’s life, endows him with a new sense of self and of self-belief. The door evinces in him ‘admiration’ and ‘a certain childlikeness’. It leads him away from easy conformity to a new and purposeful door. This story is simple, beautiful, and profound and is one of the quiet gems to be discovered in the secluded treasures of The Village.

  Like The Village, The Hermit and other stories (1977) is a rather serious collection, free of Crichton Smith’s irreverent, disarming, and punchy humour; nonetheless it features some of his best stories. ‘The Hermit’ itself is a long story based upon a novella that Iain wrote in Gaelic – An t-Aonaran (Glasgow University Press, 1976). The story is essentially the same in English as in Gaelic, though certain details and linguistic nuances vary. In fact a number of Iain’s stories have bilingual versions, which are best appreciated by the bilingual reader as being parallel versions of each other – neither identical nor fundamentally different.

  Murdo and other stories (1981) was legitimately praised on its release, critics admiring its intensity and its defiance of easy categorisation. Norman Shrapnel, reviewing it in The Guardian, applauded its ‘ . . . distinguished though elusive stories . . . He treads precarious frontiers – between prose and poetry, between poetry and dementia . . . ’

  The ‘Murdo’ stories are available in Murdo: The Life and Works (Birlinn, 2001) and are therefore not included in these volumes.

  Mr Trill in Hades (1984) is one of Crichton Smith’s strongest and most unified collections. Although the stories all centre around educational institutions and teaching staff, their diversity is great. These stories are compassionate and grim and funny and tragic: their combined effect is to create a rich and penetrating view of human life (and afterlife).

  Selected Stories (1990) represented Iain’s own choice of his best material and is naturally an extremely strong – and typically varied – collection (as indeed was Douglas Gifford’s selection, Listen to the Voice (Canongate Books, 1993)).

  Many of the previously uncollected stories published now in The Red Door and The Black Halo are as good as those stories which did make it into the collections, and I suspect many of them were omitted from the published collections for thematic reasons or because of lack of available space. They examine familiar themes but do so with a freshness that awakens alternative perspectives and ideas, often with the full power, intense imagery and sheer verbal energy that are characteristic of the short story collections in general. They allow the reader for the first time comprehensively to appraise Crichton Smith’s achievements as short story writer, to piece together this quite central part of his varied literary jigsaw.

  It is impossible, given the limitations of space here, to give an exhaustive critique of the themes, techniques, ideas and potential interpretations of Crichton Smith’s stories. Iain often explored and re-explored specific themes in his work that were not only important to him personally, but central to his literature, his very dialogue with humanity.

  One of the most prominent of these is often, appropriately, evoked quite surreptitiously: the theme of communication (more accurately, miscommunication or a lack of communication). Many of his stories are populated by couples who are – or have become – awkwardly but inseparably incompatible. A gulf of incommunicable difference has opened wistfully between them. Delusion and pathos are frequent undercurrents in such stories. ‘The Ships’, for example, is situated in a typically (Oban-esque?) Scottish village and is a powerful, though often subtle, examination of small-town ennui, loneliness, and dissemination. The narrator, Harry, limping through the latter stages of his life, has found himself in an unexceptional marriage, questioning the meaning of his existence. He is pitiful. His children appear to have forgotten him, his wife knows all too well the kind of man he is: a liar. Perhaps his exaggerations (deliciously and skilfully portrayed) are partly a poor man’s attempt to defeat the mundane through sheer creative invention. Bitterness, duplicity and untrustworthiness are dominant emotions in a story that nonetheless concludes with the realisation of some sharp home truths.

 
‘On the Road’ also features an unhappy couple who are, naturally, out of harmony with each other:

  He couldn’t understand how her mind worked at all. For two years now he had tried to understand her but couldn’t. His own mind he felt was clear and logical but hers was devious and odd. It jumped from one thing to another like . . .

  Like a rabbit, perhaps? The story is tightly written, the images densely interwoven. Correspondences, as is often the case in these stories, shine seductively somewhere just above the lucid communicative level of logic, hinting at something sinister and ineluctably superior. The ending to this story is compellingly irate, indignant, and resentful:

  The moon, white as a pearl, looked in on them through the windscreen with a huge peering power, a complete presence. It was frightening. Why the hell, he almost shouted, weren’t you shining before, why didn’t you show me the rabbit earlier?

  Perhaps the supreme example of a sustained investigation of communication is ‘The Hermit’, which tells the story of a loner’s arrival in a ‘bare bleak island’ village. His silent, passive, self-contained manner, far from catalysing his endearing integration into the village, leads to an agitated and quietly explosive period of unease within the (too) tightly-knit community. While various individuals – the narrator included – empathise in various ways with the loner, they seem to see themselves in an unappealingly clear light. The hermit, ultimately, is a scapegoat. Surely his obliquely absent presence implies he deserves much better treatment than the villagers give him, but the locals do not understand his silences, and they read their own bigotries into his lack of communication. The story is propelled by narrow gossip and by the nagging imposition of claustrophobic convention. As in The Village, routine is all: